“Feeding people with dignity”: Gaining a better understanding of the experience of using food aid in a solidarity grocery store[« Nourrir les gens dans la dignité » : mieux comprendre l’expérience du recours à l’aide alimentaire au sein d’une épicerie solidaire]

Food aid affects one in ten people in France. The aim of this research is to better understand the mechanisms for restoring dignity in the experience of using food aid in a solidarity grocery store in a working-class neighborhood. The contributions complement work aimed at improving the well-being of poor consumers, a central issue in the Transformative Consumer Research movement. We conducted a 32-month ethnographic study with a focus on triangulating the sites and data collection tools, as well as the actors encountered. We performed a thematic content analysis based on open coding of the data. The results highlight the gap between the desire of the grocery store's founders and volunteers to ‘feed people with dignity' and the users' experience of this initiative. This complex dialectic reveals the obstacles and levers for creating an experiential context that users perceive as dignified. This article suggests ways in which food aid organizations and public authorities can improve the stigmatizing experience of resorting to food aid.